5 Takeaways From Running a First Annual Fundraising Event

Here’s what we learned from the experience

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

Last Autumn, the fundraising event I was organizing with my little group of volunteers went off without a hitch, and I was quite happily surprised. We spent a great deal of time in the months leading up to the event with planning, organizing and, well, stressing out!

We also spent a great deal of time learning as we went along, and boy did we learn.

The event

The charity that I’m involved with is the Huntington Society of Canada (HSC) and their mandate is to raise money to help support the funding of research and family support services.

We decided to host a 5km fun-run (with a 1km walk option available) at a local park.

We had envisioned the location for the event to be somewhere in nature with lots of trees, but it also had to be accessible for anyone with mobility issues.

When all was said and done, there were approximately 30 people who attended, and we raised just under $4000. Given that HD is a rare disease and our contact with other Huntington’s disease families in the community was small, we were happy with this initial outing and excited to move forward with the next event, putting into place everything we learned from the first event in order to make the second one even better.

So, what did we learn?

The 5 takeaways from the first event

1. Start small: When we first started planning for this event, we were coming up with all these wild and crazy ideas for activities. We wanted bouncy castles for the kids, barbeques and a silent auction. This was way too much to get organized the first time out. We decided to keep it small and just focus on the run/walk. Once we had the initial event under our belts, then we could start adding in activities for future events.
2. Ask for help: Asking for help was another way for us to avoid being overwhelmed and burning out. Don’t be shy to recruit friends, family members or other folks from your particular charity or group to come and help out. Depending on where you are in the world, some places require high school students to complete a certain amount of charity work for school credit towards graduating. This can be a great source for volunteers!
3. Invite government dignitaries: We reached out to our local Members of Parliament here in Canada and had three government dignitaries show up on event day. They said speeches and posed for photos and presented us with certificates to mark the occasion. This was great for promotion, awareness and giving the event a real sense of professionalism.
4. Make sure your charity sends out a press release: Sending out a formal press release was wonderful. The Huntington Society completed this task for us, which they routinely do for all events associated with the charity, and we obtained a fair deal of notice from the release. A local radio station read the release and offered us a sponsorship package which included radio commercials and one of our government dignitaries was made aware of the event via the press release.
5. Talk with local radio stations: Having the radio station involved was a huge plus for us. Like I said above, they ran commercials about the events on their two stations and had the morning disc jockey come out to act as an emcee during the event! It was a wonderful promotion and awareness opportunity.

Summary

We learned a great deal and feel well prepared for the next event! The key point to emphasize is to start small. Don’t overwhelm yourself because then you’ll just end up quitting. If you want to organize a run event, then just do the run. The bouncy castles can wait.

Steven Beatty is a writer and registered nurse. He lives in Central Ontario, Canada with his wife and two fantastic kids. He’s on Facebook and Twitter @stevenbeatty. Steve is the author of the book In-Between Years: Life after a positive Huntington’s disease test, a columnist at Gene Positive on Huntington’s Disease News, and a blogger here on Medium.